Tom Carson Reviews Oz: If I Only Had a Brain

Overheard after a preview of Oz The Great And Powerful, which opens Friday: "How could you not like it?" some young chowderhead asked his date, sounding truly perplexed. "It was awesome!"

I didn't hear her answer, which was too bad. I was all set to tell her how wonderful life could be as a film reviewer. Then again, maybe she was just distressed because Helena Bonham Carter isn't in the movie, making her trust in the cosmos go all skidoo.

How did we dodge that bullet? Isn't Helena Bonham Carter always in these things, with another "Hi, I just peed in a light socket" hairdo and makeup to match? Apparently not, and my enthusiastic blurb for director Sam Raimi and star James Franco's origins-story spin on the Oz saga—"At least Helena Bonham Carter isn't in it!"—should be showing up in TV ads any day now.

Still, I owe that chowderhead. In my sentimental way, I'd been thinking the issue was whether Oz The Great And Powerful betrayed any affection for or affinity with L. Frank Baum's original books, not to mention a certain 1939 movie you may remember. But this is 2013, and who gives a flip? What matters is whether it was awesome. Unless you're willing to sit through nearly two hours of charmless guff—it feels like mainlining Crisco—for the sake of a Raimi-style gladiatorial finish ("Hah! I am armed with CGI!" "Hah! Little did you know, I too am armed with CGI"), your answer, like mine, is going to be no.

Agreed, I'm not the target audience for Oz, but who is? The movie is too smirky and long-winded to enchant children much. Older girls may dig the fake Disney-princess stuff up to a point, since the movie's all about Franco's run-ins, romantic and otherwise, with the three daughters of the onetime King of Oz—one of whom is destined, da-da-dum, to become the Wicked Witch of the West. Meanwhile, the lads they'll end up divorcing one day will just twiddle their thumbs between CGI duels. As for anyone who loves The Wizard of Oz, we're so SOL it's ridiculous, but you knew that.

The movie goes sour right from its black-and-white (duh) prologue, which introduces us to Franco as Oscar Diggs, a small-time carnival magician in 1905 Kansas. The incidents meant to illustrate his callowness are miscalculated and too unpleasant for a kiddie flick, particularly when a crippled girl (Joey King) in the audience begs him for a cure and he tries to fob her off with mumbo-jumbo. She reappears in Oz as a talking doll with her legs broken off (more fun dream fodder for the tots!) named China Girl, and so does Michelle Williams, who plays the hero's rejected girlfriend in Kansas before turning up again as Glinda the Good Witch.

But if you're going to do the "And you were there, and you" bit, shouldn't you at least be consistent about it—you know, stick in equivalents for the other important characters as well? Since nothing in the rest of the movie implies that the trip to Oz is Oscar's dream, there's also no thematic reason for the parallel casting to begin with. Like so much in Oz The Great And Powerful, it's just another bungled riff that hasn't been thought through.

Anyhow, the inevitable cyclone soon carts Franco to Oz, where he spends too much time marveling at a "magical" landscape crammed with hand-me-downs from Avatar and The Lord of The Rings. Things don't improve much when he runs into Theodora (Mila "Not Helena Bonham Carter" Kunis), who fills him in that he's the Wizard whose coming was foretold and drags him off to a puzzlingly uninhabited Emerald City to meet her big sis, Evanora (Rachel "Not Helena Bonham Carter" Weisz). But only after Oscar and Theodora have, ahem, hooked up, or so we're left to gather from their night alone in the open and her smitten gazes. Theodora is kind of a dunce, really, and Kunis doesn't get to show any wit in playing her.

Evanora—a gal with a bit more cunning—tells our boy, who's greedy for the Emerald City's riches, that he'll be King of Oz if he just slays, one guess, a wicked witch. We know right away something's fishy, since the "wicked" witch is none other than Glinda. But Franco hasn't seen The Wizard of Oz, so off he shleps, accompanied by his new flying-monkey sidekick (voiced by Zach Braff) and China Girl. Once his comely target sets him straight about who's evil and who isn't, he signs up on Team Glinda with a gleam in his eye, and the suspense about whether he'll end up as a savior or a fraud is just killing.

True, the movie could be worse; it's just hard to see how. Nothing in it coheres imaginatively, and it misuses damn near everything it touches. Though I'm not a James Franco hater, at least not all the time—he's terrific in the new Spring Breakers, maybe because he's all but unrecognizable—his performance here is in the vein of his gig co-hosting the Academy Awards awhile back, and you remember what a joy that was. Michelle Williams does what she can to make her scenes, at least, bearable, but her gift for projecting radiant sincerity has seldom been this wasted.

With its tin ear—and, so to speak, tin eye—for everything people cherish about The Wizard of Oz, this thing is also the worst insult to a beloved classic since Ron Howard's live-action version of How The Grinch Stole Christmas a dozen years ago. Unlike Tim Burton's 2010 Alice in Wonderland, its all but explicit template, Oz The Great and Powerful doesn't even work on its own terms, quite aside from what it's trashing. But aside from a handful of pop-culture Luddites, nobody complained about either Alice or The Grinch for crapping all over our attachment to the originals,and I doubt many people will get worked up about Oz's sins either. More likely, years from now, they'll be reminiscing about how great Helena Bonham Carter was in it.